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Controller support is independent of VR device usage. It's the OS/game that decides those issues. VR is essentially just another monitor with extra data driven via USB as far as the OS and game are concerned

But the Vive controllers aren't normal game controllers, they require the Vive lighthouses to function, I hoped someone could confirm the Fove headset works with the Vive lighthouses I guess, and that Steam VR can support Fove headset and Vive controllers at once.

If you already have a lighthouse and vive controllers it will be technically possible to get our headsets to play together nicely. Slapping a puck on top can give you native lighthouse based positional tracking too. This however is a hack, and best done in OSVR as of now.

Thanks for the response, however disappointing the news! Would you be able to clarify the following quote from your Kickstarter page, I would say it's misleadingly worded at best!

"We have added Lighthouse integration (the Lighthouse sensor is now integrated into the FOVE headset!), but note that Valve's Lighthouse Base Station and any additional controllers are NOT included with FOVE Pre-Orders and will be sold separately."

I believe the steam controller will work, that's what i am going to have to use. and purchase since fove's main selling point is absent from 99% of there games and applications. atleast that's what ive been lead to believe once again. ill see how it goes and report progress. Should be purchaseing the steam pad soon.

Just to clarify, I was planning to run both headsets on parallel virtual machines using the same light houses for positional data. My play space is pretty large, so I could easily divide it into to smaller play spaces for VIVE and FOVE simultaneous usage. Is this a reasonable plan?

VIVE controllers and other lighthouse devices not supported by FOVE. We recommend using eye tracking as input, where applicable, or a standard PC controller in conjunction with FOVE. We have various internal demos of both types.

That said, you can run theoretically run lighthouse and FOVE simultaneously, but they each have their own coordinate system. To use VIVE controllers with a FOVE0, you would need to synchronize the two coordinate systems.

There are two general ideas for this, though we have tested neither internally:

1) Attach a VIVE puck (or any other tracked device) to the headset, and completely ignore FOVE's position tracking. You could modify the FOVE0 Unity plugin to set the position and orientation of the FoveInterface based on the lighthouse-tracked position of the attached puck.

2) Calibrate the two systems by touching the VIVE controller to the FOVE headset and taking a measurement of the coordinates in both systems, then computing the transform in between. So if the controller is at (5, 0, 0) in the lighthouse system while touching the headset, and the headset is at (2, 0, 0) in the FOVE position tracking system, you now know that those two points correspond and you can compute the transform from FOVE -> Lighthouse as (3, 0, 0). Or reverse that to go from Lighthouse to FOVE. It's a bit more complicated than that, but that's the general idea.

Either one approach would take some hacking to setup and get working, and would only be useful for people developing content. There's no existing content that we know of that does this. We'd certainly be interested in hearing if anyone has tried this.